let's read women

Still looking for your Zuko fix?

Have you heard this Excerpt of Dante Basco (OG Prince Zuko) narrating the MMC in my Filipino Mythology Avatar the Last Airbender EXCEPT the Avatar is NOT a Pacifist epic fantasy duology?

One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."

(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)

But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.

It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.

macbeth: but not like that

hamlet: if you’re in a duplicitous violent world, your king and your peers and your girlfriend may lie to you, so only follow the advice of your steadfast best friend

othello: but not like that

as you like it: if you undergo a misfortune that causes you to hate your life in your city, give yourself a makeover and run away to the woods

timon of athens: but not like that

two gents: if you’re in love in italy, you can quickly and easily communicate important information via the verona postal service

Let’s look at Cinderella for instance. Many modern interpretations are just like the one above. Such stances, however, tend to overlook the fundamental element at the core of every Cinderella Story. Cinderella is at its core about identity. In every Cinderella story, the step-mother’s wickedness is in attempting to strip Cinderella of her identity. She is no longer a daughter of the house—the step-mother does not even allow her to count as a “maiden of the land” invited to attend the prince’s ball. She must be invisible; she must serve the house; she must sleep among the ashes so they cover and transform her and make her out to be something she was not before. Even her name, the core marker of her identity, must bear the ashes’ marks, and she becomes Cendrillon, Ashputel, Cinderella. Her step-mother employs every means to erase her as any one at all. When the royal delegation arrives and asks if there are any other maidens in the house the woman replies simply: no, there is no one else. But Cinderella’s power is her character. No matter how hard the step mother tries to erase it, she remains herself. 

Cinderella was never doing nothing. She was, instead, maintaining her identity with every move she made. She was made out to be a base creature, dehumanized, a nobody, but she never acted the part. Her continued kindness, sweetness, and gentleness shows who she really is despite the outward transfiguration. Her character acts as a marker of her true identity just as the horse head marks the goose girl or the princess’ delicacy marks the princess’ true identity in the princess and the pea. Cinderella can go to the ball and have the prince fall in love with her not because the fairy godmother sent her but because of who she is—a lady, a daughter of the house, a maiden of the land, a person with worth, a girl who loves. And at the end, the prince comes searching for her identity—who she is—and at just the moment the step-mother declares she does not exist she can come down and say it’s me, the lady of the glass slipper and the ashen scullery maid, this is who I am—and be recognized and loved for it. The whole time Cinderella has been rescuing herself by refusing to be what the stepmother tried to make her into in the only way that mattered; and the climax of the story is her reclaiming her identity. 

TFOFC-VERSE: PROJECT HAIL MARY FAKE BOOK RECS

The Father of First Contact: the Uncharted Life of Ryland Grace by Dominique Reid. (If you only read one book about Dr. Cpt. Ryland Grace, make it this one. Reid really humanizes him in ways that he deserves + this one has The Declassified Records. You know the ones.)

Amaze!: Languages of the Hail Mary by Ray Tamaguchi. (The Hail Mary Accent Book For People Who Want to Get Emotional About An Accent Shared By Two Beings And Other Cool Language Stuff Too.)

Microscopic Empire: The Fight For Taumoeba 82.5 by Thandi Mazibuko. (Mazibuko makes lab work feel like a forensics thriller, I never want to see someone say scientists can't write well ever again.)

Oxford World’s Classics Redesign: Shakespeare

The Qualifiers: Frankly I think the idea that "Media Literacy" is One Thing is bad in complicated and interesting ways. Frequently I see the argument used as a bludgeon to silence interpretations of a text that the speaker dislikes. At the same time, I think there is a mode of analysis that can be said to "lack Media Literacy".

The Goal: In general, I think we should understand analysis as a skill and a skill that should be practiced. In particular, we must remember that the reason you lack skill in analyzing texts is because it is in the interests of power that you are incapable of critically analyzing media, and thus less capable of criticizing power and organizing against it.

The Theory:

First, uh, what do we want to learn, exactly? The critical understanding here is that sentences have multiple meanings on multiple levels. They have implicit and explicit meanings. The difference between "what happened in the video" and "what is everyone in the video feeling" and "why is the video funny" and "why was the video made". All of these pieces of information can be extracted from a text, and the way to do that is practice.

The underlying and most critical piece of wisdom to keep in mind here is: Every choice that an author makes is a choice they had to make. Which decisions they made at each turning point can tell us about them. Each word in a headline was chosen intentionally and passed through several hands. The decision of when to start and stop the video had to be made. What's cropped out of the photo, or not cropped out of the photo, was done on purpose. This may sound overwhelming. It is!!! It's really overwhelming. The only way to not be overwhelmed is to practice.

The Practice:

Read. Read and talk about what you read. Read and then pause and ask yourself questions out loud. Go back and reread something you read before and point out things you didn't notice the first time and ask yourself why you didn't notice them and how you could have noticed them. And, if you can't read, write. Put yourself in the author's shoes. Learn about the medium. Listen to other people talk about things you've read (and ask yourself questions about what they're saying and why). But how do we read?

I have a small collection of strategies to learn how to read more that I'm proud of and have succeeded for me and others, in particular here are three favorites of mine:

1. Make reading a social activity. Join a book club. Start a book club. Read out loud with friends. Read in silence with friends. Find a friend who read it already and text them your reactions as you read it (they'll almost certainly love you if you do this). Post about your thoughts as you have them and share your thoughts with friends.

2. Schedule time to read. I recommend 30 minutes a day to start, though I usually do an hour. This is in my opinion best for classics and books that are more difficult to get through, but also works for most texts if you're struggling with boredom. If 30 minutes is too long, start at 5 minutes and add one minute every day. When you're done reading, I highly recommend channeling the energy built up while reading into other creative tasks, or even into talking about what you read.

3. Make reading more casual. A lot of my friends struggle not just because they can't make time to read or because reading is too low energy, but because they actively lack reading skills at the level of "it's difficult to focus on the words for a long time". In this case, read fanfiction! Read extremely low energy things! Read things that are just dumb fun! Read until you reach a point that reading is easy, even if that takes years. And let yourself enjoy the process. Like, find a collection of hundreds of stories published online with a tag you like or curated by someone who you trust and just start trying them one by one (this is surprisingly easy to do). I do recommend pushing yourself to spend a certain amount of time on this every day (even if it's as little as five minutes), but the goal is low stress and to work on building up basic skills, so I recommend structuring this requirement as just recording every time you succeed so you can build pride in your progress. The reason I recommend piling a large list of fanfiction is so that you can be able to drop things you don't like. So you can entirely avoid the "I need to read this for an assignment even though it's awful and I hate this" headspace. But ideally it should be a collection that will have things that you'll truly love, so things will hook you and carry you to read them. Good luck! It's hard but worth it.

-Marge Piercy and Ira Wood, So You Want to Write